editorial at/@
tortillaconsal punto/dot com
by toni solo, December 11th 2009
The recent death in Nicaragua of Grant Gallup, an Espicopalian minister from the United States, prompts the usual feelings of bereavement and gratitude as the loss of any much-loved and respected person. But Grant's was much more than a benign presence dispensing wisdom, goodness and occasionally barbed wit to those around him. Grant Gallup was a resolute defender of human rights and a determined advocate of revolutionary change in favour of the impoverished majority. Grant figured as himself in the 1986 film "Before Stonewall".
A brief biographical note here notes, "Born Jan. 28, 1932, in Stambaugh, Michigan, Gallup entered Alma College, a Presbyterian affiliate, in 1950, and graduated magna cum laude. He entered Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in 1956. For three decades Gallup served St. Andrew's Church, an African-American mission on Chicago's west side. Gallup marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and once hosted the Black Panthers in his parish hall. He was a charter member of Integrity USA and the first chaplain to the Chicago chapter. Lifelong friend and Integrity founder Louie Crew once asked Gallup how, as a gay man, parishioners were dealing with his openness, to which Grant responded, "The same way I deal with theirs." In 2003, Gallup travelled to Iraq, offering himself as a human shield in hopes of preventing the impending U.S. invasion. For many years, Gallup published weekly sermons he called "Homily Grits.""
After retiring to Nicaragua in 1988, Grant's base at the Casa Ave Maria in Managua's Barrio Monseñor Lezcano became a welcome haven for thousands of visitors to Nicaragua from all over the world. The mural he created there in homage to revolutionary religious women in the Americas was emblematic of his belief both in the fundamental need for equality and too in the inspirational leadership of women to defeat injustice. Grant's Maria was less the submissive head-in-the-clouds Virgin Mother and more a practical get-things-done, stand-your-ground Mother Courage.
If one considers the spiritual, moral-political generational group of which Grant Gallup was so very much a part, the roll call includes notable figures still alive like Miguel D'Escoto, Roy Bourgeois, Thomas Gumbleton, as well as a sobering list of martyrs. That list includes the four US religious, Jean Donovan. Dorothy Kazel, Maura Clarke and Ita Ford murdered outside San Salvador in 1981 and Padre Guadelupe – Fr. James Carney - disappeared by the Honduran army and its US advisers in Honduras in 1983. Perhaps the clearest moral-political cause uniting all these people is their steadfast rejection of the effects of militarism in the service of economic and political injustice that so markedly characterizes the Americas.
Diametrically opposed to that group of revolutionary religious figures is the class of military and diplomatic functionaries, in the service of cynical, ruthless US government administrations, currently seeking by any means to recoup the US plutocracy's declining power, influence and control. One of the propaganda motifs deployed by that class is the fake motif of anti-Americanism. Whenever that motif is deployed it betrays the extent of the propaganda collusion between the international corporate media and the US government.
The sleight of hand is twofold. Firstly, the frauds who use the term “anti-Americanism” collapse all of Latin America, North America and the Caribbean into the United States. Secondly, they collapse the United States into its government. This profundly disturbed megalomaniacal move then interprets legitimate criticism of the US government's characteristic cynical, sadistic, hypocritical foreign policy as “anti-Americanism”.
That absurd counterfactual quasi-rationality effectively erases the very existence of outstanding individuals like Grant and his fellow dissident US religious companions. The mere phrase “anti-Americanism” rewrites the history of the US government's crimes against humanity not just in the Americas but everywhere. Americanism itself is in fact the pernicious doctrine that only US plutocrat elite perceptions and perceived interests are important, that the interests and well being or even the very existence of everyone else is completely subordinate.
As Malcolm X remarked “I just try to face the fact as it actually is and come to this meeting as one of the victims of America, one of the victims of Americanism, one of the victims of democracy, one of the victims of a very hypocritical system that is going all over this earth today representing itself as being qualified to tell other people how to run their country when they can’t get the dirty things that are going on in their own country straightened out.”
US elites have acted throughout history against the material interests and fundamental rights of the United States people, against all the people of the Americas. Currently, the same elite class that has persistently betrayed the interests of the US people overseas is now inflicting an even deeper betrayal at home. Trillions of dollars have been devoted to rescue the elite's bankrupt Wall Street cronies while over 15 million US citizens are unemployed – abundant welfare for the rich, the brush-off for everyone else.
The psychotic autism of the frauds who deploy the arguments of “anti-Americanism” defies rational analysis. A recent example of the genre was the question put by Robert Blau, the senior US diplomat in El Salvador to the leadership of the FMLN. Objecting to what he termed “anti-American” remarks by an FMLN leader Blau remarked “I want to know, what is the true position of the FMLN with respect to my country?”
One wonders what Blau expects the FMLN leadership to say. That they detest Louis Armstrong, Jimi Hendrix and Aaron Copeland? That they are angry at the sporting achievments of Muhammed Ali, Mark Spitz or Jack Nicklaus? That they vehemently reject the philosophical writings of Daniel Dennett, W.V.O.Quine or John Rawls? That they don't find Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen or Eddie Murphy funny? It is a trivial fact that the FMLN leadership object to US government foreign policy which for decades has consistently supported the FMLN's murderous enemies in ARENA nationally and in the local oligarchies regionally. Blau's indignation is pure, cynical play-acting, like those soccer players that dive in the penalty area.
The sheer banal obtuseness of individuals like Blau and other suave barbarian confrère Negroponte-spawn like Robert Callahan in Nicaragua, or Hugo Llorens in Honduras points to the enduring, timeless duplicity and mediocrity of US government diplomacy. That diplomacy has consistently betrayed the interests of the huge majority of people in the United States. Domestically, the same class of people has wiped out the high-wage manufacturing economy of the United States, condemning the vast majority of the country's population to what Michael Hudson and others rightly describe as “debt peonage”.
If the US ruling classes want to identify the fiendish sources and leading proponents of anti-United States government feeling, they have only to look in the mirror and consider what they themselves have done to their country and its people. The saving virtue and undying glory of the United States are its many millions of great humanitarians like Grant Gallup who recognise their own humanity in that of everyone else in the world. They do so and act accordingly out of an incomparable spirit of fellowship and love.